One of the hottest new things in web development right now is pretty old. JavaScript is taking the world by storm through the XMLHTTPRequest. My question is, isn't this exactly what Flash MX was designed to do?

I have only been working with Flash for about three-and-a-half years, and one of the first things that drew me to it was the ability to get and post to other pages without a page refresh. Flash was designed to do this from the beginning. With the ColdFusion flash gateway, developers can even directly access CFCs and other template pages. The question then is do we really need AJAX?

I think so. One of the benefits to using AJAX is that it is possible to create standards compliant web pages that are more dependent on the resources of the client and less on the server. Back in the nineties, it was much better to rely on the servers because they often had more computing power, but now desktops are very powerful and most can handle the rigors of sorting and validating data. These are probably some of the more banal uses of AJAX, but these are things that should be handled by the client and not the server.

There will be some overlap between AJAX and Flash. Many in the AJAX camp will claim that AJAX is much lighter than Flash as far as bandwidth is concerned, and I can see that poorly designed Flash will take more bandwidth than well designed Flash. It is possible to draw components with actionscript. This puts the drawing entirely up to the client, with the Flash movie being mostly just compressed script. If AJAX needs to use graphics, it has to send them via CSS during the initial download, and afterwards these images will be available as long as they are in the browser's cache. It is even possible, as it is in Flash, to have the initial page appear while still downloading components.

I think that for some projects AJAX will be the technology of choice, but for others Flash MX will be optimal. Personally, I believe that for most of the jobs you could do with AJAX, Flash will be the faster solution because of the well designed nature of the IDE. Flash is now a platform and the Flash Development Environment is the tool. Macromedia is going to embrace Eclipse to try to get Java developers to see the benefits of creating web applications with Flash. I think that in the long run, Flash is a good bet, and that AJAX is sort of a fad that will become less and less a good choice as bandwidth becomes more available. I like a lot of what is happening with AJAX, and hopefully the developers of Flash will keep working toward accessibility. But in the end, well designed flash applications are hard to beat. They don't need screen refreshes, the Macromedia components are well designed and often will take XML as their data source. The applications allow more interface flexibility than traditional CSS, although this is changing, and overall lead to a better user experience.

So why do I bash Flash constantly? My negativity where Flash is concerned comes from having to endure many, many very poor Flash websites and applications that use Flash just because it moves. The developers often spend little or no time in working with the actionscript, and they don't plan for low bandwith users. Many Flash developers believe that the dial-up and ISDN / Mobile users don't matter and that is simply bankrupt thinking. Developers should plan and develop for the least common denominator. A light design can still be a good design, and is often, in my opinion, the best design. AJAX lends itself to better developer practices by its complexity, but I don't believe that complexity is ever a good solution to a problem. Perhaps with the introduction of AJAX tools, and an IDE this complexity could be improved upon, and we are already seeing the beginning of the uses of AJAX in web applications and they are quite impressive, but most of the impressiveness comes from the fact that they are doing it without Flash, not from the application itself.

The fact is that over 90% of the web is Flash plugin enabled, and it is a relatively small and fast download. If you want to design really solid applications, take everything you have learned about minimal design and apply that to flash development. Perhaps then, Flash can turn its negative image around and become a real tool for business solutions.

I'm working on this project now that makes heavy use of standard javascript, Flash, ColdFusion, and HTML. The project is using the TCallFrame javascript function to control the flash movie. Because of the nature of the project, the timing between the movie refresh calls makes using a refreshing iFrame not possible for the text information that I need to display. Likewise, the text needs to be displayed using complicated styles and colors, controlled by ColdFusion components that Flash can't handle easily.

So I was faced with a dilemma. I couldn't refresh an iFrame without throwing the timing of the TCallFrame request, combined with some javascript cookie writing, I didn't write the original application, and Flash remoting calls. Basically, nothing should happen until the cookie is written, which it doesn't, most of the time.

It eventually dawned on me, not only that the application needed to be strengthened with some type of cookie listener at the very least, and a small-scale rewrite at the most, but that I only really needed the application to think that there was no iFrame refresh, but an AJAX call using an invisible iFrame could work.

So I began working on it and it evolved into a two-part system. On one hand, the div that contained the text to be returned from the ColdFusion components needed to be continuously refreshed, which I found out after struggling with another timing issue. Eventually I realized that the variable that needed to be set in my parent window was empty at the time of the screen refresh because the iFrame hadn't finished loading yet.

So what I had to have happen was for the iFrame to make a javascript function call to the parent once the variable was written. Once I had that accomplished it was easy to have the checkboxes that called the TCallFrame javascript call the function to refresh the iFrame. It worked wonderfully, but unfortunately it still caused a timing issue with the main movie. It delayed the writing of the cookie by a hair. Still it was cool to see, that I had an actual use for AJAX.

I have actually found other uses for it, but none as clear cut as that. Flash just wasn't flexible enough. I'm not reversing myself, I still think that Flash should be most developers' first choice when it comes to remoting, but in a pinch AJAX is allright!

I have recently come under some minor pressure from various factions about why, while knowing Flash fairly well, I am always reluctant to design and build a flash site featuring the technology. My history with Flash is pretty much the same as most other developers. My first versions of this very site three or four years ago were made entirely in Flash, as were many of my customers sites. Flash seemed like the way to go. It rendered the same in every browser, fonts weren't an issue, and it allowed an incredible amount of freedom to create.

So why then were my sites so problematic. The first issue was one of bandwidth. I had music and lots of motion on these sites. They were extremely interactive and eye catching. The problems came up when users had to come to my site using dial-up. When they hit the site and saw the loading bar, the first thing they did was to click back and go on to another site. My webtrends illuminated this for me. My next step was to go more minimal, which is my favorite thing to do, but then I wondered why I was using Flash at all, because now the motion was mostly gone, and so was the majority of the interactivity. I was using flash simply for the z-index, and I was finding that I could do this with CSS. So, not to be deterred, I did another redesign that kept the motion and interactivity, but minimized the huge bitmap graphics that were giving me the long download times. Instead, I used vector graphics. These were much smaller, but now I had a new problem. If my clients didn't have at least a Pentium 4 running at greater than 2 GHz, my site ran slowly, so slowly that it was almost unusable.

The next issue was that in all the time I had my site, I could never find it using search engines. I discovered that search engines couldn't index my site because they couldn't see through the Flash. To the spider, my site looked like a huge gif in a HTML file with some meta-tags. In other words, it looked like nothing. I tried alt tags, no script tags, etc… but nothing helped. Finally, I decided to design an alternate site for dial-up users using good ol' XHTML and CSS. I found that as soon as I uploaded the file, the search engines had me, and no one ever visited my Flash site anymore.

Suffice it to say that I took my Flash site down. Later, I would redisign my site again so that it would adhere to web standards and could render even faster for all users. That site is this one, and it is the first that I am happy with. I am enjoying some minor success with getting listed on search engines and blog aggregators, and life is good.

I don't hate Flash any more than I hate Allen wrenches or crowbars. It is a tool, and typically you try to use the right tool for the job. It seems to me that many web developers, however are trying to use a sledgehammer to staple two pages together. It just doesn't work. In some cases Flash is OK. In corporate settings, Flash is an excellent tool for presentations, product demonstrations, promotional materials delivered through the company intranet, or from the presenter's local hard drive, as long as it doesn't have to be delivered over the web.

There are a few cases where it is perfectly reasonable for designer / developers to build flash-only web sites for people. Art sites, such as photography showcases can benefit from Flash and its fantastic bitmap compression. Flash photography sites can often download faster than their HTML / CSS counterparts due to smaller image sizes. Some product demonstrations can benefit from Flash and its interactivity. Many cellular phone providers have used Flash to great effect in this regard. Simple branding banners contained within standard HTML / CSS pages with limited motion and interactivity can be excellent, as long as the text of the page is available for the user to read while the Flash is loading.

Still, designers and developers need to ask themselves, what exactly am I trying to do, and who is my target customer? I have had a very hard time making a solid business case for Flash on most of my ecommerce and business sites. Flash, like ColdFusion and Chess, takes only a minute to learn, and can take a lifetime to master. There is a lot to Flash, and a good designer knows how and when to use it to make a site look more professional, or to enhance content that may otherwise appear to be bland. However, beginners seem to tend to develop only in Flash because it addresses many of the apparent problems with XHTML / CSS. Those of browser incompatability, having to learn JavaScript, etc. Someone with limited knowledge of ActionScript and no knowledge of HTML is able to open Flash MX 2004 and create a website. Many designers use Flash exclusively, for this reason.

It seems that XHTML / CSS / JavaScript is having a renaissance. With the proliferation of blog sites, and better browser support of web standards many Flash sites are starting to look tired, and compared with the relative quick response of the HTML sites, many users are deciding to click away from the loading screens in favor of a site with similar content, or products, that is designed in standards compliant XHTML. Not because they love web standards, but because to the user the XHTML site works better and they don't have to wait. I have actually heard designers say that they don't care if dial-up users can't access the site, it has to be beautiful. This thinking is bankrupt, probably 80% of the country is still using dial-up. BroadBand is still frequently ridiculously expensive, and until this changes Flash will be limited to design and car sites mostly, while the bulk of the web is built using XHTML.

I'd actually like to see that change. I'd like to see 3 Mbps synchronous connections standard in every home across the country, and Flash sites loading instantly, but the reality is that it won't happen within the next 5 to 10 years. At least not until garbage cable company decides to charge reasonable rates, and build better fiber backbones, and adequate DNS resources.

In the meantime, I'm quite happy with CSS / XHTML. It does everything I used to do with Flash, but it does it faster and is more accessible. Hopefully more designers will build standards compliant sites, and will realize they can be every bit as beautiful as Flash sites. Check out csszengarden.com to see other great CSS designs.

I didn't even know about this and it has been out for about a month. Microsoft has heard the cries from web developers used to using Firefox's developer toolbar extension. While it is often pretty easy to validate your pages using Firefox, see how your block level elements are behaving, and look at the DOM of your page using the Firefox extension, it has been almost impossible with the awful lack of tools for Internet Explorer. They have finally addressed this.

The new IE Developer Toolbar has almost everything that its Firefox adversary has, except for the strong javascript debugger. This is very upsetting especially considering the lame debugging that is built into IE today, but with the relative dearth of tools for internet explorer, anything is welcome.

I have found the toolbar to be extremely useful. The DOM inspector is wonderful in that it highlights the selected item if visible to indicate for which item you are viewing properties. If you have to build applications or websites using Internet Explorer at work, I hope you are designing for Firefox at home, no… I guess you always have to design for Internet Explorer, then you will love the new toolbar. I'd suggest that you download it and install it right away.

Now, I am almost never one to stand in the way of business progress, however this doesn't seem to be a good day for application developers. There are those who believe that with more capital, everything gets better, but this developer is not one of those people. Does Adobe have better marketing than Macromedia? Arguably, no they don't. Has Macromedia done a great job of marketing ColdFusion? No, they haven't. Will a combined Macromedia and Adobe do a better job than an unacquired Macromedia? Probably not. I don't think that Adobe will put the resources that are needed behind future ColdFusion development. It is just too far away from their core business competency. So just where will ColdFusion go?

It makes sense for Adobe to sell off ColdFusion and Flex, kill Freehand, GoLive, and ImageReady, and roll Dreamweaver and Fireworks into their Creative Suite in their place. It also makes sense for them to continue Breeze development as that is well within their abilities. Flash will probably thrive under the combined company as should RoboHelp, etc…

I think that if Microsoft is paying attention, and I believe they are, it makes sense for them to acquire ColdFusion from Adobe and combine it, Flex, and XAML into one ubiquitous language. It wouldn't be too hard to map ColdFusion to XAML and vice-versa. The benefit to Microsoft is that they could phase out ASP altogether and embrace the tag-based ColdFusion as their web development language of choice. After all it is in line with their corporate vision which is apparently to let web developers make desktop applications as easily as they currently build web applications.

While I don't particularly relish the idea of Microsoft owning my current development lanugage of choice, they do know a thing or two about marketing code, and it wouldn't be difficult to have it run on top of the .net framework and Java so that it could be portable. It would of course be a little faster on the .net framework. Besides, Microsoft ColdFusion just sounds better than Adobe ColdFusion. Having used the VisualStudio beta for C#. I really like it. I could get used to this being my development environment for ColdFusion. It would also be nice for Microsoft to release a VisualWebStudio for Mac and PC centering around ColdFusion. While we are speculating, it would also be nice to have a .net framework for Mac and Linux, but this could take a while.

So, lets assume that Adobe has a clue of what they have in ColdFusion. They could begin to use it to develop their own desktop application language around Flex and the standalone Flash player. This is why Redmond's ears will be perked up today, and for the next couple of years. Adobe has interest in delivering 3D over the web, and Flash makes a good vehicle for this. It would be possible to either expand the Flash player into a Flash runtime and use ColdFusion as the language to create all sorts of juicy applications that spanned the web and the desktop. They would then be in a position to deliver a rapid development environment for desktop applications and would compete squarely with Java and Microsoft in this space, albeit with a much better interface aestetic.

I hope the latter is what will happen. I belive that competition in all aspects of technology are good for consumers and the overall business. Still, either way ColdFusion has either a very bright future, or a very convoluted future. I find it interesting that none of the analysts looking at this acquisition are looking at ColdFusion. I guess that is because it isn't the primary business driver for Macromedia, and Adobe is all about graphics, which is my primary concern.

There is a third option, and one which looks really good to me. It is possible that Adobe will simply allow ColdFusion to languish and eventually the product in that form will atrophy and die. This would be bad, but there is an open source movement for an OSS version of ColdFusion. It would be sweet to see this because it would become more robust, more object oriented, and a lot faster. It would also be more secure because of all the eyes on the code. ColdFusion could become an underground hit, much the way that PHP has been getting a lot of attention recently.

Enter Apple. Has anyone been paying attention to the Apple Widgets in the new Tiger? Does anyone get how important this is? Web developers can create really sexy looking desktop applications as widgets using JavaScript and CSS. This has massive implications as there is already a significant installed base of JavaScript developers, and many of them happen to be pretty good at CSS. JavaScript has been seeing a revival of late and I expect that it will continue. Soon delivering cool applications over the web to Mac users will be easier than it is to learn C# and do it for Microsoft users. Enterprises will feel good about building enterprise applications that use these widgets to communicate with Java applications on the back end. Many people are switching to the Macintosh because they feel more secure running Linux than they do Windows, and this is another reason for businesses to embrace the Mac, although many of them don't realize it yet.

All of this will marginalize the need for PC users to upgrade to Longhorn. Microsoft already is going to have a tough sell to businesses based on the stagnation of hardware sales and the poor business case for upgrading. Most large organizations are still running Windows 2000, and they are going to tell them that they have to upgrade every system company wide in order to run this? If they can get away with it, I'd expect most organizations to upgrade to Macintoshes because of their lighter IT demands and more granular controls over user access.

Microsoft has to get XAML right, and it makes sense for them to buy their only real competition which is ColdFusion, especially now that it is owned by an ally who is almost incapable of understanding it, or its fanatical developer base (of which I am proud to be a part). They would probably let Microsoft have it for a song, and ultimately ColdFusion would be a more robust language with wider appeal. This would be a good thing. But Microsoft really needs to get their act together today if they hope to sell even one copy of Longhorn Server. If CF were bundled in the IIS package with this, I would most certainly upgrade to it. I think that most developers who don't have an irrational hatred of Microsoft would too, if it were a serious effort to make both CF and IIS better. My major gripe with Microsoft is that they make consistently boneheaded business decisions, missing the boat entirely in some places, and jumping out with an idea that is ten years ahead of its time in others. I don't hate them for obscure philosophical reasons, in fact I don't hate them at all, I just think they aren't getting the best out of their products or their developer community, and aren't offering their customers what they want.

Contrary to what most people believe, web advertising is in its infancy. Many companies are still trying to figure out what works, and what doesn't. Their experiments are understandable, they are trying to figure out an audience that spans all known geographic, ethnic, social, economic, racial, religious, ideological, and moral boundaries, phew! That was a mouthful. There are still even newer marketing demographics and sub-demographics being created while they are trying to figure out how to target the old ones. How on Earth is a marketing / web development studio supposed to get a grip on all of it. The answer is elusive, but first I will say what won't get the job done, then we'll explore some ways to get it done.

The way advertisers won't get a grip on web niches is by utilizing dirty tricks in advertising. This includes, but is not limited to, pop-ups, pop-unders, javascript pop-ups, unwanted javascript redirections, flash pop-ups, spam email, and tacky, poorly designed banner ads. Let's look at these one at a time. There has never been a time in the history of the internet where unsolicited pop-up advertisements have been a good thing. As indicated above, this was forgivable because the internet was new, and this was a new way to reach people. Once, however, people began to hate this method of advertising, and demonstrate it by installing software to prevent pop-ups it should have stopped, right. Wrong, instead web marketers began to circuimvent users' defences and use pop-under ads, or advertisements that would come up and hide behind your top browser window, waiting until you closed your browser. Great idea right?!!? Wrong, that is like letting that one advertising exec with the awful ideas in the office get a shot at a limted run of ads. For example, he comes up with A new cola bottle with an overweight child pouring a bag of sugar with the cola label into his mouth, with a moniker reading cola making a big America even bigger. This runs in limited fashion despite the passionate pleas of every focus group it is exposed to. Cola sees a radical drop in its sales numbers, but instead promotes this guy to creative director, thereby putting the ads on billboard all over the country. Eventually Cola goes out of business, a smouldering ruin of its former greatness.

That should never happen in real life. That is the absurdity of trying to irritate users into adopting your product, it just doesn't make sense, and will end up making a company bankrupt. But it didn't stop there, the anti-pop up software got smarter, and was better able to block pop-under, and javascript pop-up windows. Now, there are always going to be an element of shadyness associated with some companies. That is as true in reality as it is on the web, hence unwanted redirections. But there were and are legitimate companies that have used, and are still using these tactics. Surely by now these companies have gotten the message that users don't want a bunch of pop-ups littering their desktops; and they have. The problem now is that in an effort to be less invasive, they have adopted CSS and Flash pop-ups. Talk about dense! People don't want to wait to get to their content. These are barriers, just like splash pages. People will click away.

Spam email is probably the most reviled thing the internet has ever produced, however companies continue to do it, and they put their (click here to remove yourelf from our list) in like 6pt. font at the bottom of their email surrounded by disclaimer information. Most users at this point aren't even looking at the garbage that comes across in their email. They either delete it immediately, or they look at the ad, remember the vendor so that they can never ever buy anything from them again.

Tacky banner ads are the least of the evils described in this article, but they can be just as distracting as pop-ups. Flashing, excessively moving or audible banner ads are no-nos. If you want people to be able to view your website at work without their bosses going nuts, you should make it look professional so that it blends in with the rest of their applications. Not draw attention to it so that they get a repromand for spending too much time on the net.

So, now that we have explored how not to advertise on the net, let's see how to advertise. When I go to Froogle

Apple with Safari 2.0 has taken a major step toward standards compliance and largely are taking a leadership role in this area with its outstanding support for the Java runtime. I have heard some griping about Apple using KHTML, the default rendering technology behind the Konqueror browser for KDE, for a base, then running away with the open source once they have figured it out and not giving it back to the OSS community.

While I am extremely happy that Apple has made their browser Acid2 compliant, and they may have one of the fastest CSS rendering engines around built into the AppleWebCore. It is pretty upsetting that they would not share these advances with the developers working on KHTML so that it could also pass the Acid2 test. I can understand that some things you want to keep close to your vest for security reasons, but I can hardly believe that changes you have made to the way pages render in a browser could compromise your system integrity. This appears to be a situation in which Apple wants to be the most standards compliant platform on the market. This would be fantastic from a business standpoint since many in the scientific and mathematics communities would probably prefer to use technology that adhered to standards so as to better communicate information between offices, regions, and countries. I can understand that Apple wants to distinguish its platform from others, and I love the fact they are using standards compliance to do this, however I feel that it is to break the spirit of open source / corporate collaboration not to give something back to the KHTML community.

Speaking of Safari, I noticed a bug recently while writing some javascript for it. I have a javascript that sets the tabindex for a number of input fields, and it works properly, however in Safari it persists in scrolling the real browser scrollbar instead of the div, overflow:auto, element's scrollbar. I had noticed this way back in Safari 1.2 where if you put a flash item within a scrollable div, it would take the flash element and while scrolling lay it on top of all your other content, even if it was above or below the div. All other browsers, even IE 6, handle this properly, scrolling the div with the tabbing. This is a pretty big bug if they want to promote standards compliant web development and accessability. I'd like to see this fixed in Mac OS X 10.4.1, but after browsing the message boards elsewhere, I'd say they already have their hands full, so I am not supremely hopeful.

Microsoft is promising that its IE7 browser will be standards compliant, but just how standards compliant is really the question. I think that Microsoft has learned the error of its proprietary ways. Sure it will continue to bundle its software with everything anyone buys from them, but I don't think they will continue to cripple other products to make theirs look better. They seem to have given up on their own version of DHTML and are happy with XHTML. I noticed that their primary page even validates now. I think that it makes sense for Microsoft to go the standards route also, and with no shortage of developer feedback, they have almost no excuse not to.

As the market leader and pace-setter as far as which technologies make the cut for the web Microsoft has a responsiblity to create the most standards compliant browser possible, even at the risk of breaking legacy sites built specifically for IE. Microsoft has always wanted developers to use it's unusual flavor of IE. Whether it is by building extra padding into block level elements regardless of how the css padding attribute is used, or allowing oddities like allowing the use of the color attribute on TR table elements, developers have always had to consider the quirks of IE when building anything for deployment over the web.

I'm sure that IE 7 will be much improved over IE 6 as far as standards compliance is concerned, and some of those oddities I truly enjoy, like being able to give a TR an ID attribute and specifying a header style for my tables in a stylesheet, but at the same time, if we don't have web standards we'll devolve into fragmented development languages like it was 1995 all over again. IE 6 actually had excellent standards compliance when it came out, but times have changed and there are some advanced features like page-break-after that I'd love to use more widely. Part of the reason I love to build intranet applications for Mac only shops is that I know they will be using Safari 2.0 which is an excellent browser based on the open source Konqueror browser bundled with many Linux distros. It supports most if not all CSS 2 tags, and should pass the Acid2 test with ease. Also, by developing to XHTML 1.0 Strict I know that my site will degrade gracefully on everything from mobile devices to old 3.0 browsers. Using ECMAScript also keeps most backward compatability and allows developers to create reliable JavaScripts that will work across all compliant browsers in the same fashion.

I agree with Hakon Lie that Microsoft should really take more time and make sure they nail this one, not just for right now, but for the future since we all know they won't release another web browser perhaps forever since they are convinced that Avalon will change the face of web applications and render the web browser superfluous. We've heard that one before, remember Active X? I hope that everyone calls on Microsoft to work to get IE 7 to pass the Acid2 test, not just so that it will support some bizarre standard that is going to make all our lives harder, but so that developers can be sure that applications they develop today will still look and work the same five years from now. C'mon Microsoft please?

Another issue I kept coming across during my configuration of the XServe G5's Apache and JRun4 was that the virtual hosts didn't seem to be resolving. The same site appeared to collect all the hits. After several hours last night troubleshooting, I finally found the culprit.

When the JRun / Apache bridge is configured, a small module is built and plugged into Apache that allows it to process ColdFusion templates from within its default web root. This functionality is great, it allows a user to serve up .jsp, .php, and .cfm files from the same folder. A single modification is needed to JRun to allow web users to get to your files without having to add /cfusion to the end of their URL request. In JRun there is a setting under the “Application Server” > “Summary,” you will see a section titled Web Applications. Under this header there will be two apps if you have JRun and ColdFusion set up correctly. They will read “CFMX RDS Application” which we are not going to do anything to, and “Macromedia Coldfusion MX,” which we are going to change. If you click on the name of the application “Macromedia Coldfusion MX,” you will see a simple screen that will show you the current context path for the application, which should be “/cfusion” or something similar. If you change it to “/” then your templates will run from the root domain.

With this process, however there are a couple of caveats. You may have to copy all of the coldfusion JavaScript files to a cfusion subdirectory in your applications folder, if you are using ColdFusion forms validation. Also, the images for the administrator will nont appear when you work with the administrator. Accessing the administrator is not quite as straightforward as you might expect, also. A minor change is needed, it obviously no longer needs the “/cfusion/CFIDE/Administrator/index.cfm,” instead it now will use “/cfide/Administrator/index.cfm.” Make sure to make the “cfide” lowercase or it will not work.

Once you have this working, if you already have applications loaded into the “JRun4/servers/cfusion” directory, and they happen to have the same folder name as the ones in your Apache web root folder, then when you call your templates, the server will not know which ones to pick which will have the effect of causing long nights of hair pulling to figure out why your file changes have no effect on the operation of the server. The resolution is simple, do not use the servers directory of JRun to execute your web applications, instead use the Apache web root. You will have to delete any common files between the appliation in your folder within the JRun servers folder, and the Apache web root. Basically just delete your web application from the JRun application folder, and have it only located in Apache's web root, if you haven't already gotten that.

My issue was that both files had the same index.cfm file, and what was happening was that the virtual root was resolving properly, but a cflocation tag that I had in the index.cfm contained within my JRun servers directory was being chosen over the same file in my Apache web root. Once I deleted the version of the application in the JRun folder, the issue disappeared, the server was behaving correctly.

The moral of the story, don't leave superfluous files around your server, they will always come back to haunt you in the end.

One of the coolest things in the not-so-new-anymore ColdFusion MX 7 release is the ability to use Flex and ColdFusion tags to generate Flash components without having to design them. One of the perennial headaches for a web developer has been the difficulty in creating self-validating forms, and grid components that could take the stress of sorting off of the web or database servers.

I am not really too into screenshots so I will just show you a sample of the new flash forms. I am not sure if they validate or not, but they are definately cool. The built in forms validation is excellent also, it is handled completely on the client. If you press the submit button without entering any text in the you must enter some text field, it will show you the error. The binding is sweet too, you can bind one item to another in a form. If you notice, when entering text in the top box, you will see the bottom box mirroring it.Flash Form Example

That is sweet for many different reasons, here is the code behind it:
<cfform name="code" action="http://www.owensperformance.com/test/formExample.cfm" method="post" format="flash" height="600" width="639" preloader="true" timeout="100" preservedata="yes">

Another really cool item is the cfgrid component. It is a fully featured flash grid that can show any number of objects. I am toying with the idea of implenting it on my search page, using javascript to show and hide the results, but that seems like overkill. I would show one to you in action, but you’ll just have to settle for the code.

This will create a nice grid component that handles sorting for you. It will draw its data from the query myQuery. Each column will pull from the field in the database according to its name. For example the date column will get its data from #myQuery.date#. The others will get their data similarly. I don’t know why I didn’t use flash forms before. They are certainly cool. You can bind to the data in the columns so you could have a field that would allow you to edit the currently selected field in the database. This is extremely handy in creating sensible and usable forms. I hope this helps, some java application servers don’t support flash forms, in fact I am not certain that this one will. However I’ll try, if it doesn’t work, at least the code may be helpful.